Christopher Meiklejohn is a Software Engineer with Basho Technologies, Inc. where he focuses on building rich web applications for Riak using Erlang and JavaScript. Before joining Basho, he worked at Swipely, a loyalty program startup based in Providence where he maintained critical infrastructure components written in Ruby. Christopher is also a graduate student in computer science at Brown University in Providence RI, where he studies formal verification and distributed systems.

Nowadays, Ruby on Rails is a near ubiquitous choice when choosing to build a web application due to its promises of rapid application development and a growing ecosystem of libraries. However, once you start to color outside of the lines that the framework provides, you end up authoring more code to work around assumptions inherent in its design. This talk will look at an application which started as a prototype in Ruby on Rails, and eventually ended up as a Erlang web application. We will look at the benefits of writing your application in Erlang, specifically scalability, maintenance, testability, and then explore various deployment options for getting your application in front of users.

Talk objectives: To provide an overview on how to implement web solutions on top of Erlang and address common problems and solutions.

Target audience: Beginner Erlang developers with experience in building applications with rich MVC frameworks such as Rails.